Tag Cloud Experiment

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Tag Cloud Experiment

(16 posts) (3 voices)

Started 3 years ago by john
Latest reply from Prit

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Tag Cloud

john
Member

Hi,

This afternoon I explored several Tag Cloud approaches. I concluded that in its original form (displaying words in different sizes / colors according their total count in a given content) was of limited use.

So as a 1st. experiment, I modified a pritlog function and added some code to place a tag cloud on my header, using post titles as content and preserving links to original entries.

A 2nd. experiment I'm thinking about, is to create a tag cloud that uses one link per word, to start a search when clicked.

Tag Clouds are visually attractive, my point is to see its value as an navigation aid as well. Comments are welcome :)

My test blog > http://www.enbaires.com/blog1/

John

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Hi John,
Your cloud looks cool. I liked the color combination on your cloud. As mentioned on the thread "Category cloud", I have added a category cloud also on the development site for Pritlog (pritlog48f). This currently uses the categories and the more posts a category has, the bigger the font it uses. In my opinion, for the tag cloud approach to work like the popular sites, we will need to get rid of the categories and introduce tags for posts. Posts can have multiple tags and hence, this way, the cloud will be bigger and make more sense.

Starting a search when clicked is a great idea. But then, how would you generate a list/tags?

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

The idea is to click on tag cloud words to get the same result page as in a normal search.

But it should also be possible to generate a "second level" tag cloud as the result page. Interesting idea ...

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Yes .. I understood this part. But how will you come up with the list of tags dynamically?

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

The script I'm using already generates the cloud dinamically :)

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Does this script read through all the posts on your blog and generate a list of words that it thinks can be used as tags? How does it decide which word can be used as tags? Or is this something you have to tell the script someway?

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

It can be modified to define which content to include (using post titles as it does now, comment titles, post content, a combination, etc)

It allows to define shortest acceptable words (i.e. 3 chars) and an array of excluded words. It strips html tags leaving only relevant text which is further split into separate words.

Once word popularity is calculated, each word gets its own span class to define its font color and size through css.

Once the script is set, everything is dynamic ! Nice combination isn't it ?

Let me experiment a bit more and put things in a more readable form and I'll be glad to share the code with you.

Posted 3 years ago #
klhrevolution
Member

Is it possible for the tag cloud to be placed in the sidebar ? I'm with prit his sounds like what I'm attempting. Though I will take much longer than you two.. As for my input which can be ignored why not stick with the category instead of the use of tags ?

"This currently uses the categories and the more posts a category has, the bigger the font it uses."<-- nice

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

No problem if you want to use category titles as content or place the cloud on the sidebar.

It took me 6 hours to get this beast working, I'm not sure how efficient my code is (I'm not a php expert) but on my side it loads reasonably fast.

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

As I mentioned at the start of this thread I just did my 2nd. experiment.
You can see the result on my test blog http://www.enbaires.com/blog1/

For Prit and Ken who saw my 1st experiment yesterday, now I populated the cloud with the 20 most relevant words taken from entry titles. Clicking a link starts a normal search for that word using the original searchPosts() function.

Note: the search results usually shows more items because the original function looks into post content (not titles). This can be adjusted later.

My purpose is to compare >

1. what I had yesterday = links with full post titles (might be changed to use category titles), with font size/ color according to individual word count. Click on links displayed the corresponding post page.

2. what I have today = links for single words, with font size/ color according to individual word count. Click on links starts a normal search using that word.

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Looks good John.

Will the post title always be a true evaluator of the tag or category? Anyway, we are on a good path.

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

Using category titles should be more reliable, but authors are currently enabled to create new category names constantly adding new "tags" to the equation in the same way post titles do.

A new idea to consider (besides its impact in the clould tag) is to use fixed categories, defined by the blog admin, and selectable through a dropdown menu.

This makes a lot of sense to me as it would lead to a more consistent content classification than letting authors define infinite category variations.

Posted 3 years ago #
klhrevolution
Member

john: I like the idea of having a config entry of the most used categories/tags, using cat titles, I also like this idea of allowing the blog admin defined on the admin page.

Whichever direction this goes I'm feeling comfortable with these types of thoughts & ideas. I never meant to try and get people to re-invent the wheel. I was more along the lines of modifying the current function for categories so as to be more pleasant and presentable rather than having a large accumulative list of categories on the side bar.

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

The category cloud as seen on the Pritlog development blog site will be available in the beta release. As of now, authors can look at the cloud and decide which category to use or to create a new one. Also, the admin can edit any post and change the category as seems best to them. When there are no entries in a categories, that category disappears. So this is not a problem as of now.

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

Believe it or not I wasn't aware that you already had a tag cloud until yesterday, as I was watching channel 48e instead of 48f when I started to experiment with the idea.

Let me say that I enjoy the opportunity to collaborate with this project and learn new things along the way

On 48f you said "For it to be actually called tag cloud, we may have to remove the categories from Pritlog and start using tags. So multiple tags should be allowed when posting" Could you clarify what you meant ?

Thanks Prit :)

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Hi John,

I am sorry for the confusion caused. I have been changing names of the test blogs and it might have caused confusion. Couple of times, I myself had to be careful to keep a log of what each test blog was having. I am glad you enjoy helping the development of Pritlog. Thanks a lot for all the ideas all of you bring to this forum.

Posted 3 years ago #

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